Musings of a Montana State University Story Highbrow

Friday, March 11, 2016

Things have been pretty spectacular lately up here at the Borderlands Lodge, and I hope the same has been the case for you. Over winter break I was in Bozeman, mostly, and the spring semester began at MSU in mid-January.

This semester I'm teaching an upper-division class in Soviet History as well as the senior capstone seminar, and much of the rest of my time has been spent reading, writing, and submitting grant applications for a new research project that I'm proposing. In other words, pretty much standard operating procedure for a professional academic.

In the hunt for research funding...

One cool thing that happened lately was being interviewed, along with a number of other scholars, for an article on Eurasianet.org about Turkish-Russian relations.

The article, called "Turkey and Russia: History Fuels Rancor,"was then picked up by a lot of places, includingThe Moscow Timesand many other sites. And it was fun to see the piece scrolling on the JMB Borderwire.

Other sites running the piece were somewhat more comical. One of them appears to have been auto-translated back into English from the Russian-language version of the article, which was an interesting idea. This version identified me as a "Montana State University story highbrow," which is definitely going on my next set of business cards.

Montana State University Story Highbrow in action

"History Fuels Rancor"

The title of the piece was
actually at variance with the message that most of us who were
interviewed actually had to say, but that's okay. Presumably the people
running these sites know much more than I do about how to attract readers and clicks.

Nevertheless, the article raises an important issue: to what degree should we attribute agency to abstract concepts like "history?" Does "history" really fuel conflict, or rather do politicians and others invoke history as a means of justifying actions which are undertaken in the interest of contemporary concerns? My view, and that of most of the other scholars who were interviewed for the article, is the latter. While historical memory is important, and can be invoked as a powerful rhetorical tool, the respective leadership circles in both Ankara and Moscow are doing what they do, I think, not so much because they are the helplessly swayed by "history," but rather because they see an advantage to their actions. "History" may be invoked as a means of justifying or explaining political actions, but is not the actual cause.

This is not always an easy argument to sell. In the United States, there is a particularly pronounced tendency to view international developments in terms of abstract concepts. Ask an American why there is so much fighting in the Middle East today, and chances are they'll mutter something about "Islam," or "Shiite-Sunny rivalry." Twenty years ago, Americans were equally eager to blame the wars in Yugoslavia on "ancient hatreds," as opposed to the contemporary interests of those who were involved in creating those wars. Perhaps because so many Americans tend to view their own government's role in the world in rather simplistic and idealistic terms ("spreading democracy," "bringing peace to the world"), there is a similar tendency to accept at face value narratives of world politics which assign agency to abstract (and usually timeless) principles. We see this even among otherwise sophisticated analyses of international affairs, which obsess far too much over narratives like "neo-Ottomanism" or "re-building the USSR" as a means of explaining political decisions made in Ankara and Moscow.

I'm not arguing that these narratives have no meaning, or that history doesn't matter. But for as long as we turn to abstract narratives as a means of explaining international politics,I think we are pretty much taking our eye off the ball. Whether or not we agree with them, the people making decisions in Ankara and Moscow are pursuing policies in Syria and elsewhere in response to what they see as their contemporary interests. No matter how often abstract concepts may beinvoked to justify these policies, there are always contemporary interests that play a decisive role in their formulation.

Does any of this sound familiar? It should, because this is basically the argument that I make in my book. In Turks Across Empires I discuss a group of individuals who are known mainly for their connection to a form of identity, pan-Turkism, and look at how their invocations of identity and those of the people around them were grounded within much more tangible concerns. Muslim identity, I argue in this book, was "marketed" in a variety of ways by a vast array of individuals. By showing how invocations of identity are often based upon material concerns, rather than simply abstract concepts, I encourage the reader to look beyond these invocations when thinking about not only the past, but also the present day. In short: don't take these discourses at face value.

Without question, history matters. But that doesn't mean that we should fetishize it. And when "history" is invoked as a means of explaining other people's present-day political undertakings, the first thing we ought to do is to start digging deeper.

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From the Borderlands Lodge...

I am an historian of the Turkic World with over 20 years of experience living in and writing about Turkey and the former USSR. My first impressions of the region came when I was working as an English teacher in Istanbul from 1992-1999. During these years I traveled extensively in the Balkans, Turkey, the former USSR, the Middle East and Asia, and studied Russian and Hungarian in addition to Turkish before returning to the US to pursue a graduate education.

After receiving an MA and PhD from Princeton and Brown universities, I held research fellowships with the NEH/American Research Institute in Turkey, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Since August of 2009 I have been a professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University in the cool little ski town of Bozeman, MT, holding the rank of associate professor since 2015. My first book, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, was published by Oxford University Press in November of 2014.

I am spending the 2016-2017 academic year in Russia through the support of a Fulbright research scholar grant.

Find me on...

Turks Across Empires

Oxford University Press, 2014

Reviews of Turks Across Empires

"...path-breaking...Meyer demonstrates brilliantly the shifts in articulation of cultural and political identities as well as change of the specific vocabulary in the written texts of the Turkic intellectuals."--Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

"...a skillfully crafted and soundly constructed account...Meyer's book is a page-turner, admittedly not a common trait in scholarly history works. It frequently turns into a sort of amusement park for historians, where the author parades so many newly unearthed, rich in detail, and immensely informative archival documents...finely tackles somewhat delicate yet thorny matters such as Turkism, Pan-Turkism, Ottomanism, and Islamism, as well as addresses the lives of humans who were doomed and perished or sometimes enriched and saved by those very same matters." --American Historical Review

"This thoroughly researched monograph offers a noteworthy caveat to the infatuation with 'identity' that for almost two decades characterized the post-Soviet scholarship on the non-Russian peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires...Meyer leaves us convinced that discourses and claims of identity need to be understood in relation to concrete power configurations and resulting opportunities, and not as articulations of perennial or even would-be nationhood." -- Russian Review

"James Meyer's Turks across Empires is a very valuable and intriguing reassessment of the origins of pan-Turkism through an in-depth examination of some of its leading figures...a great pleasure to read...Meyer's book is 'revisionist' in the sense that it successfully challenges many assumptions and arguments in the study of Russia's Muslims and pan-Turkism...provides a more complete, flesh-and-bone biographical reconstruction of these intellectuals and their milieu...the depiction of Kazan Tatars as 'insider Muslims' of Tsarist Russia is simply brilliant."--Turkish Review

"[Turks Across Empires] presents a wealth of information drawn from archives, periodical publications, memoirs, and other documentary evidence in the languages needed for such a study: Ottoman, Russian, Tatar, and the Turkic of Azerbaijan... As a result, Meyer’s narrative fills in gaps and makes connections that nicely complement the steadily expanding literature on the late Ottoman/late Romanov period and the Turks who shaped their own and wider Turkic identities in that era. By extension, the identity question has profound implications for twentieth and even twenty-first century intellectual and political trajectories."--Review of Middle East Studies

"Based on an impressive array of sources from Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, James Meyer’s monograph not only expands the knowledge about the Muslims of Russia but also provides a widely applicable argument about instrumentalization of identity in different political contexts." --Council for European Studies

"James Meyer pursues an imaginative approach to the final decades of the Russian and Ottoman Empires by focusing on the biographies of three activists—a Crimean Tatar, an Azerbaijani, and a Volga Tatar—who, while born in Russia, were men with substantial interest and experi- ence traveling to and living in the empire’s southern neighbor. Biography becomes, thus, the modus operandi for unraveling the roles of these and similar men—“trans-imperial people,” as Meyer calls them—in propagating pan-Turkism and suggesting it as a new identity for Turks, who were also overwhelmingly Muslim, everywhere."--Slavic Review

"A major contribution of this work is its use of original source material in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish and Russian. Using personal correspondence and Ottoman and Russian tsarist era archives, Meyer traces four distinct periods to their trans-imperial existence moving back and forth between Istanbul, Kazan, Crimea, and Azerbaijan...an important contribution in several ways."--Turkish Area Studies Review

"…the book does a very good job in bringing the complexities ofRussia’s Muslim intellectual life of the late imperial period close to a readership broadly interested in the modernization of Russia’s peripheries and in Russian-Ottoman relations… Meyer convincingly demonstrates that since the 1870s Muslim communities in inner Russia perceived the state as a threat, especially in view of the administrative attempts at taking control over Muslim schools."--Journal of World History

"...impressive...James Meyer’s book is a collective biography of the most prominent pan-Turkists—Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869–1939), and İsmail Gasprinskii (1851–1914)—by means of which the author reveals the patterns of migration from the Middle Volga, Southeast Caucasus, and Crimea to the Ottoman lands and back, as well as local politics in each protagonist’s original region…The fruit of this admirable exercise is most visible when Meyer demonstrates the simultaneous formation of population policy on both the Russian and Ottoman shores of the Black Sea."--Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

"Few Ottomanists understand the complexities of the situation of Muslims in the Russian Empire, while scholars of the Russian Empire have tended to imagine the Ottoman Empire only in broad brushstrokes. Meyer is one of a small new crop of scholars who possess the requisite skills…The narrative is richly documented and thick—perhaps the best account of Volga–Ural public life in English…" --International Journal of Middle East Studies

"Meyer, assistant professor of Islamic world history at Montana State University, draws from Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian archives to bridge the gap between borderlands and peoples in this innovative study of the origins of pan-Turkism. Tautly argued and empirically grounded, the book highlights the diverse nature of identity formulation during the late imperial era, when the forces of modernity presented new challenges to traditional religious communities".--Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Turks Across Empires is deeply-researched, drawing on sources in Russian and multiple Turkic languages from no fewer than thirteen archives in the former Soviet Union and Turkey. This research is showcased beautifully in chapter one (‘Trans-Imperial People’), which is a superb, groundbreaking introduction to the large demographic of Muslims who — like Akcura, Gasprinskii and Agaoglu — moved between the Russian and Ottoman Empires"--Slavonic and East European Review